h a man in
the fight," and "who had the heart of a lion."

With all the brilliance and the heroism of these wars between England
and France, the glory is not untarnished; for the very patterns of
chivalry were too often guilty of most atrocious cruelties. Charles, the
saintly Count of Blois, cutting off the heads of the Breton knights and
throwing them over the walls of Nantes; Philippe VI. inviting the
Bretons to a tourney, and then seizing and executing them; the Count de
Lisle hurling from a catapult, over the walls of Auberoche, the
miserable servant who had ventured to bear letters from the garrison
through his lines; these, and more than these, are the sort of things
one finds even in the pages of Froissart, who was so careful to conceal
the unpleasant and to bring into the light of genius the chivalrous
episodes in his chronicle of the wars. For the weak and the fallen there
is little of pity; a word as some brave knight falls, a word of the
sorrow of those dependent upon him, and on we go to fresh fields, fresh
knightly exploits and pageants. Though the very spirit of chivalry is in
the air, how little thought is given to woman! It is only the rare
masculine qualities of a Jeanne de Montfort that can win her grudging
notice from Froissart.

When such is the spirit animating the great chronicler of the age, it is
rather remarkable that we find even three or four women winning such
fame as to be remembered. The great war will in time bring forth the
greatest heroine of France; yet it may be questioned whether Jeanne
d'Arc would have received even fair treatment at the hands of Froissart,
if the knight-chronicler had lived to see the glory of this wonderful
peasant girl illumine all France. We may guess that Jeanne the saint,
even Jeanne the valiant warrior (he loved warriors better than saints),
would have been for him but Jeanne the peasant, the miserable child of
some more miserable Jacques Bonhomme, to whom the courtly chronicler
would have referred with contempt, scorn, or brutal hate.

The horrors of war are not allowed on the scene in the chronicles from
which we draw most of our information about Jeanne de Montfort; but it
is pleasant to find in these same pages at least one recognition of the
higher and better role of woman, as intercessor for the distressed. We
allude, of course, to the famous and beautiful story of Philippa of
Hainault saving the citizens of Calais, a story which we shall venture
to s